* Next cry for help in eurozone could ignite investor panic, considering what happened to bank bondholders in Cyprus.

The devil lies in the detail of Cyprus' salvation.

The island nation's rescue sets precedents for the eurozone that may stick in the memory of depositors and bondholders alike during the wait for another victim of the debt crisis. Under the terms of the agreement struck early Monday in Brussels, senior Cypriot bank bondholders will take losses and uninsured depositors will be largely wiped out.

The take-away message — that stakeholders of all stripes can be coerced into helping a cash-strapped nation — may make investors more skittish should Slovenia, Italy, Spain or even Greece again need help. The risk is that bank runs and bond market selloffs will become likely the moment a country applies for a rescue, said economists and academics from Nicosia to New York.

"We now have a new type of rule, and everyone within the eurozone has to sit down and see what that implies for their own finances," Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides, an adviser to the Cypriot government, said on "The Pulse" on Bloomberg Television.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index erased an earlier gain of as much as 1 percent after Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who led Sunday night's meeting of finance ministers from the euro region, indicated the model used for recapitalizing Cypriot banks could be replicated elsewhere.

Until now, eurozone officials had left bank depositors and senior bondholders untouched as they tried to rescue the bloc's struggling economies in a series of all-night summits over the past three years.

The Irish banking system collapsed partly because Ireland's government refused to renege on a guarantee to deposit holders made after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. In Spain, senior bank bondholders have been safeguarded, unlike investors in the subordinated debt and preferred shares of Bankia Group. And in Greece, a restructuring of government debt was set up in a way that avoided default.

With Cyprus, that tradition is being broken. The original pact, announced March 16, shocked Cypriots by imposing a levy on all deposit holders. That is no longer the case, but this marks the first time that senior bondholders in a euro region bank are taking losses. Senior bondholders in Laiki Bank will get wiped out.

"The Cyprus crisis has opened up some precedents that will make investors more worried about how future eurozone crises will evolve," said Steven Englander, head of Group of 10 currency strategy at Citigroup Inc. in New York.

As taxpayers across northern Europe balk at the cost of rescuing their cash-strapped neighbors, Europe's crisis fighters are spreading the net wider. There may be few taboos left, says Charles Goodhart, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics.

"They will swear black and blue that Cyprus is a unique case, but so was Greece," he said. "You can talk about the inviolability of insured deposits, but the problem now is: Would anyone believe you?"

The first use of capital controls by a euro-area member may also pose a challenge to countries such as Malta, Luxembourg and Estonia, whose banks, like Cyprus', have large foreign deposits, said Jacques Cailloux and Dimitris Drakopoulos, economists at Nomura International Plc.

"There is a serious risk that these depositors decide to reduce their exposure, putting other countries under stress," Cailloux and Drakopoulos said in a report to clients.

Some spot silver linings. Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, told Bloomberg Television the Cypriot deal marks a "step forward" for Europe by better detailing the order of who loses out in a rescue.